No One Is an Atheist on Their Deathbed (Right?)

Mark Edmundson writes this in his article about Sigmund Freud's later years in Sunday's New York Times Magazine:

"The ability to believe in an internal, invisible God vastly improves people's capacity for abstraction. [Sigmund Freud writes in "Moses and Monotheism"] 'The prohibition against making an image of God--the compulsion to worship a God whom one cannot see,' he says, meant that in Judaism 'a sensory perception was given second place to what may be called an abstract idea--a triumph of intellectuality over sensuality.' If people can worship what is not there they can also reflect on what is 'not there, or on what is presented to them in symbolic and not immediate terms. So the mental labor of monotheism prepared the Jews--as it would eventually prepare others in the West--to achieve distinction in law, in mathematics, in science and in literary art.' It gave them an advantage in all activities that involved making an abstract model of experience, in words or numbers or lines, and working with the abstraction to achieve control over nature or to bring humane order to life. Freud calls this internalizing process an 'advance in intellectuality' and he credits it directly to religion."

In the words of Linda Richman, discuss.